A talented artist who narrowly escaped death at the hands of a serial killer after being tortured channelled her horrific ordeal into a vital means for catching criminals.
Lois Gibson was a forensic artist at the Houston Police Department in Texas for four decades and whose sketches over the years helped authorities catch more than 1,300 wanted people - 1,313 to be exact. She was so good at her job that she holds the Guinness World Record (GWR) for the "most criminals positively identified due to the composites of one artist".
Now 74, Lois, who retired in 2021, began drawing criminals in 1982 following her attack in Los Angeles, which prompted her to move south to Houston. "He attacked me and he tortured me almost to death. When he left, I had blood coming out of my eyes and down my throat.
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"So, I know what it feels like to ponder my own death at the hands of somebody for no reason but that they’re just a horrible person," she told the world record organisation when talking about her intruder attack in the 1970s.
Serial killers who walked free from The Serpent to the Panama StranglerHe beat her unconscious and raped her. “It was a torture rape. I thought I was going to die," she told CNN back in 2005. Lois didn't report the attack out of a sense of shame, she said and eventually moved away to start a fine arts degree. Initially, she sketched portraits for tourists before landing a job with the police.
She told GWR: “So, the first time I worked a murder for the Houston Police Department, and it was a crummy, pitiful, sketchy sketch, but when I realised that pitiful piece of art could stop a murderer who killed the same way I almost got killed – somebody tried to kill me – I stopped someone who tried to do that in our Memorial Park.
“And I had planned to not ever do it again because doing that sketch was so horrific emotionally, but once I realised that I caught the guy, I knew I was hooked. You get addicted to catching criminals once you realise you can catch them with just a little bitty sketch that took less than an hour."
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However, the artist is adamant that today's AI cannot replace a human when it comes to building a composite interpretation. Her feelings aren't just intuitive, they come from years of scientific research taking every programme she could find. She said: “I found out scientifically, it’s a fact. I really did try, I mean, over years I took all the training on every programme. I tried really hard.”
The world record holder, who's held it for around 20 years, has even had to redo AI sketches as they failed to bring the perpetrator to justice, adding that, “it just doesn’t even come close because you have to be an artist like me." The first sketch she created was shown on the news and the roommate of the assailant then turned him in. She questioned why an artist like herself would want to attempt a digital composite when it is "quicker and easier" by hand.
Throughout her years of experience, Lois said there is a knack for being able to unlock the memories of a "highly emotional" victim through certain techniques, such as distraction. These can help describe their attacker enough for a sketch to help apprehend them - something a computer cannot always do.